Are you parched for new music? Then you’ll want to tune in to today’s Noontime Concert for music of Harry Partch.
Partch’s vision encompassed unusual, often microtonal scales, but also striking combinations employing handmade instruments of his own design. Partch, a percussion ensemble that shares the composer’s name, will join the PRISM Quartet for “Castor and Pollux: A Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini,” part of concert which took place at Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in June.
Also on the program will be “Skiagraphies” (“Shadow Etchings”), for saxophones and Partch instruments, by Stratis Minakakis, who is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory, and “Radical Alignment,” by jazz saxophonist and experimental composer Steve Lehman.
Then, from a concert given at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts in Kansas City in October of 2015, PRISM will join the University of Missouri – Kansas City Conservatory Wind Symphony for “Ba Yin” (“The Eight Sounds”), a concerto for saxophone quartet, by Chen Yi. The title refers to a type of Ancient Chinese music played on eight kinds of traditional instruments made of – or with – metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourd, clay, leather and wood.
PRISM’s next set of concerts will take place at Drexel University’s URBN Annex Black Box Theater, 3401 Filbert Street, in Philadelphia, this Thursday at 7 p.m., and at 3LD Art & Technology Center + 3-Legged Dog Media & Theater, 80 Greenwich Street, in New York City, this Friday at 8 p.m. For more information, visit prismquartet.com.
I hope you’ll join me for music by American original Harry Partch, part of today’s Noontime Concert, and that you’ll stick around. I’ll be on until 4:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.